Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Mehmet Binay and Canner Alpert | Zenne Dancer

I
wish I could report that the film I am about to write about, Zenne Dancer,by the Turkish film-makers Mehmet Binay and Caner Alper, was a
total fiction; alas, it is based on a true incident that occurred to an acquittance
of the directors.

The movie recounts the
inter-relationships between three figures, a beautiful male-in-drag belly
dancer, Can (Kerem Can), his former gay lover, the university student Ahmet
Yildiz (Erkan Avci), and a gay German
photographer, Daniel (Giovanni Arvaneh) who, while in Istanbul, shifts from his
war-time reporting to the delights of the city, including snapping pictures of
Can, whose patronage helps him to survive in a strange world where, in an attempt
to escape the military draft, he goes out only at nights to dance without pay
at a gay club.

In case it might strike you that Can is
involved in a strange activity in belly-dancing with lavish costumes but often with
a bare chest that reveals his beautifully chiseled torso, I’ll quote a couple
of paragraphs from an article by Tara Isabella Burton in Smithsonian Magazine about the zenne
dancers who participate in a popular entertainment in Turkey:

Male
belly dancing is hardly a new phenomenon in Turkey. Most zenne dancers date the
practice back to the Sultan’s court in the final centuries of the Ottoman
Empire, when women were largely prohibited from performing onstage. Much as how
boys would play women’s parts in Elizabethan Shakespeare, young men – generally
ethnic Greeks, Armenians, or Romani, drawn, often unwillingly, from the
Empire’s non-Muslim population – would be trained as dancers, adopt androgynous
or feminine attire and makeup, and – in many cases – moonlight as paid
courtesans to noblemen.

In traditional Ottoman practice, the
terminology of “gay” and “straight” was largely absence from discourse, as
explained by scholar Serkan Görkemli. Sexuality was more customarily defined as
a matter of status/rank and sexual role. A higher-ranking nobleman would as a
matter of course define himself as an active or penetrative sexual partner, one
who would under other circumstances sleep with women; a zenne dancer would be
expected to take on a more so-called “feminine” sexual and social role.
Regardless of whether or not sexual relations between dancers and their
spectators took place, however, zenne dancing (and the watching thereof) was
considered part of “mainstream” masculine culture..

Even though with Turkish modernization,
the zenne tradition fell out of favor, it remains a staple of entertainment in
many parts of Turkey.

As a university student, Ahmet is still
also very fearful of being stopped by the Turkish military police and being
conscripted. In the very first scene of the film, in fact, he seeks to be
hidden in Can’s dressing room, fearing that even being seen out at night, and,
in particular, in a zenne bar, might
draw attention, and he is particularly fearful in this case because of his
traditional Muslim parents, particularly his harridan of a mother, who is perhaps
the real villain of the work.

Through Can’s agreement to be
photographed by Daniel, the hirsute Akmet meets up with the equally hirsute photographer
and, gradually over a period of days the two become lovers, while still both
remaining friends with the more fragile and needy Can. If both Can and Akmet
live basically shadow-lives out of fear for the societal forces, Daniel has the
ghost of his past in his sex-wife, who is now his agent and is highly critical
of his new photographic interests, wishing he might return to filming on-site
battles and the children scarred by war instead of his new fondness for the picturesque
oddities of the great Turkish city.

While Akmet’s parents are holy horrors,
his sister, with whom he lives, is totally modern and seemingly accepting of
his nightly wanderings—except when the gorgon of a mother comes to visit. Can’s
aunt, with who he lives, is a loving and caring woman in complete acceptance of
his lifestyle, even while her husband highly disapproves; and Can’s mother,
living in the country, loves her son so dearly that it truly borders on incest.
On a visit to her, later in the film, he can hardly pry her hands from a deep
embrace to escape back to the city. The outsider Daniel, given his completely
Western upbringing cannot even quite comprehend their predicaments.

And therein lies the rub, so to speak. As
Daniel and Akmet grow closer, so too does the German, who is determined to take
Akmet back to Germany with him, encourage him to speak out about to sexuality
to his parents, as does the obviously utterly outed Can. Daniel is simply naïve,
while Can’s motives seem somewhat sinister, since he should perhaps perceive
the difficulties of declaring homosexuality in a modernized but still mostly
Muslim country—but then his family has clearly adored for being “special.” Strangely,
when both men are forced into interviews prior to induction, Akmet gets off for
being gay (the Turkish military like to see pictures of sexual penetration to
prove those who claim homosexuality, and to this day may have one of the
biggest collections of gay pornography in the world), while the zenne dancer
Can is accepted: we can always use a belly-dancer in our ranks cracks one
military officer. But both men are destroyed by their “honesty,” although
perhaps Can survived military duty to return to his love of dancing.

When Akmet finally does confess his
sexuality to his parents, the mean-spirited mother forces her husband to take
up a gun and to kill his son in a kind of reverse “honor killing,” usually
reserved for women who have supposedly been immoral in sexual activity or for
divorcing their husbands. In Turkey, evidently, Akmet’s father is still in hiding.

Despite the fact that this is quite
amazing and that such a movie was even permitted to be filmed in Turkey, the
production values of the work are excellent, the directors working within a
fairly large financial investment for such an independently produced work. My only
quibbles with the film are its sometimes quite excessive production numbers
representing Can’s imaginary choreography of his dances; as one critic
observed, at moments the film seems undetermined whether it wants to be a
serious expose about the terrible events it documents, or a comic drag film in
the manner of Priscilla: Queen of the
Dessert.

In the end the film succeeds simply
because of its honesty about its trio of gay heroes. And quite surprisingly,
when shown in gay film festivals in Turkey, became a great hit, as it was in
the gay film circuit in the US—although until its release in Netflix it has not
had general US distribution. Even I, who often seek out the unusual, almost
passed on this one. Belly-dancing in Turkey, I smirked. But on further
exploration, I became more interested, and am happy I was. This is a tragic
statement not so much about being gay, but about being different in a culture
that is based on broad ethnic and cultural differences, but with individuals
often trapped within the confines of those very walls of identity.